Thursday, November 8, 2018

If your organization is struggling to take advantage of the open
source software (OSS) market, here are some proven ways it can help you
achieve truly transformative success particularly if you are
implementing DevOps.

1. New opportunities

Commercial software and OSS both provide common capabilities as a
commodity to all competitors in a market. However, OSS is distinguished
in at least two important ways:

Having the source code enables an OSS user to create derivative works resulting in market-differentiating, value-added services.

Appropriate governance provides an OSS user the opportunity to
create business-focused features that may influence industry patterns of
practice.

2. New business models

Use market position to your advantage by deciding which OSS
capabilities should be standard and open to anyone and where you would
like to compete with proprietary offerings. You can continuously alter
the competitive landscape to benefit your customers.
Effectively, your OSS product strategy can define and maintain the boundary between the "red and blue ocean" for your industry's core technology.

NextGen Connect
offers one example of this business model narrowly focused on
healthcare data interoperability. Its product offerings range from OSS
to proprietary appliance-oriented options, with the latest features
appearing first in the proprietary versions. The line between OSS and
commercial/proprietary is constantly shifting with market demands and
opportunities.

The commercial-to-OS software continuum also supports trends that
focus on the monetization of data and services rather than software
license revenue.

3. Self-determination

Commercial vendors strive to offer products and services that are
attractive to the widest market and deepest pockets. This often results
in overly complicated and resource-intensive software bloated with
unused features. Products developed to offer specific capabilities can
morph into "platforms" trying to serve every need. Vendor lock-in
through customization, vertical integration, and proprietary operational
processes creates a barrier to change that can be cost-prohibitive and
restrict the ability to quickly pivot to new market opportunities.

In contrast, OSS components and solution stacks allow a much finer
degree of control and ability to abstract underlying technologies from
business processes. Your roadmaps become your own, independent of a
vendor's feature and release schedules.

4. Responsiveness

Two critical areas where timely reaction and intervention can avert
problems are security issues and bug fixes. Commercial vendors strive to
be responsive when addressing such issues but, by definition, they are
serving multiple customers with varying needs, sensitivity levels, and
sophistication, which can impede their time to deploy a solution.

OSS communities tend to coalesce around deploying the simplest
solution in the shortest amount of time. Having access to components'
source code allows direct, rapid intervention if needed. The response to
the Heartbleed vulnerability incident of 2013
is a good example. Open source based applications consuming affected
components could be patched quickly because there was no need to wait on
an official vendor supported patch. Users could independently weigh
risk and patch as they determined best.

5. Time to market

OSS culture emphasizes self-reliance and naturally leads to DevOps
processes and associated organizational alignment. DevOps can be
fostered with public cloud infrastructure where appropriate. Open
frameworks comprised of OSS stacks and public infrastructure increase
your overall velocity and ability to realize value sooner. DevOps and
OSS complement each other by emphasizing the importance of just getting
started to begin seeing results.

6. Cost-efficiency

There are solid opportunities in OSS to drive hard dollars out of
solutions and operational transaction costs if you are willing to pursue
supporting strategies ruthlessly. Unlike OSS, commercially licensed
products often struggle to differentiate by feature or performance.
Bottom-line: with commercial products, often you are paying extra for a
trademark's reputation, software-as-a-service delivery, or a support
contract—rather than demonstrable added functional value over OSS
solutions. Making the open source argument is worth the effort.
Community-based software development has proven its value in some of the
most challenging spaces. Marketplace competitive forces suggest that
any business turning a blind eye to the open source movement is ceding a
significant advantage to competitors. Just as low-cost, shared
resources on the internet have dramatically reduced the barrier to entry
when it comes to infrastructure, the rapidly evolving breadth and
quality of open source components will quickly alter the competitive
landscape across many vertical marketplaces.

Please consider supporting me in the 2018 Twin Cities Marathon in Minneapolis, MN. I am raising money for the UnitedHealthcare Children's Fund which awards medical grants to children across the United States. I participate in multiple charity races throughout the year to help raise money for such worthy causes. You can donate here.

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